A Velvet of Vampyres. Don Webb

in the springtime. She had been to Paris as a little girl. It was different then, she had dreamt of going to see the Eiffel Tower.

      He fell gently onto the street. She might drain him all the way­ to see if he had the strength to pass over. What was it Norbert ­said about that phase-transition?

      He was watching. He had pressed himself against the wall of a building, being at one with its shadows.

      When he saw that she saw him, he stepped forward smiling and open.

      “Who are you?” she said.

      “John Seymour.”

      “That’s very helpful. What are you?”

      “A connoisseur of vampirism.”

      “What if I don’t like to be watched?”

      “You like to be watched, you dream about it, you fantasize about how good you are, and I must say you are unlike many of the clumsy excuses for vampires I’ve see, are quite good, and quite beautiful.”

      “You’re very gallant to have such a morbid hobby.”

      “It isn’t a hobby. Here have a picture of me.” He reached in his pants pocket and took out a snapshot. It was him standing on Commerce Street in full daylight reading a paper.

      She looked up at him to ask another question, but found herself paralyzed for a moment. When it passed he was gone.

      * * * *

      The next night, the mystery man was all she could think of. She stood at the street corner in the photo. Sometimes she would fly high above it and watch the streets and alleys. But he didn’t come.

      The night after that she tried hanging out at the Black Orchid.

      The third night she was really hungry, but she made herself feed only in tiny amounts all over the city in the hopes she would find him looking at her.

      She wanted him.

      Not in the way she wanted a victim; although there was some of that.

      She wanted him in the way she used to want a man, if after two hundred years of no human desires her memory was accurate.

      It wasn’t just sex, it was—well something more.

      On the fifth night he found her. She had been heading to the Café Du Monde. He was behind her on Decatur St.

      “Ms. Burgess?” he asked.

      His voice was warm like the gulf sea she had played in so very long ago.

      “Yes,” she said.

      “Ms. Burgess, I thought about dropping by your home on Chambers St. today, but when I realized that you wouldn’t be up.”

      Fear filled her, she should run, he knew where her coffin was. But his eyes were the eyes of starlight, and she could fear nothing.

      “Ms. Burgess, or may I call you Sheila?”

      “You may call me Violeta. I was born Violeta Zivie.”

      “What a beautiful name, the ‘veiled one’, how fine for someone in ­whose aspect and her eyes the best of both bright do meet.” He said.

      “What do you want from me?”

      “Everything, really. All the world and time. But I will start ­with a question: do you miss the day?”

      Sheila thought of the warm sun—that great yellow that she had­ not seen since the early settlement here.

      “Of course I miss the day.”

      “I can give you the day. Well maybe I can give you the day.”

      “How?”

      “I am your future, much as you are the future of men. I feed upon vampires, drawing their rich accumulation of the past. I don’t have to feed often, once a decade perhaps. So I spend a long time looking for my prey. I’ve been watching you for three years, ever since you killed a student of mine at Tulane.”

      “Norbert. But I—”

      “You needn’t say anything. He died happy, which is a rare thing ­in the world of men.”

      “I had hoped he would pass over.”

      “I had hoped so too, I would have spent many long nights with him as we would bring science to bear on ancient magics. Oh don’t look at me that way, I am not interested in putting blood in vials and testing my theories on dogs and mice. There is a way to approach magic with science, already half in magic and wholly informed by wonder.”

      “Did you become what you are through your science?”

      “No I was you. I was brought to an even higher realm by a poor mad woman. She never knew what had happened to her, how she reclaimed the day by feeding on her own kind. Trying for self knowledge began my sciences”.

      “If you drain me, I will be as you?”

      “You might. Or you might be a husk that I leave on the street to ­wait the long centuries looking for one as beautiful as you.”

      “That doesn’t offer me much hope.”

      “We have never been in the job of offering hope. Only possibility,” he said.

      “Norbert said that, he said that vampires offer dreams,” she said. “What do you get if I die?”

      “Nutrition and two hundred years of memories, not just yours, but of all those you have feasted upon.”

      “And I would get such dreams as you represent.”

      She thought about it only a moment, and then looking deeply into the cobalt of his eyes, decided they were so deep that the future must live there.

      She stepped forward and put her arms around him. She kissed him­ once, then offered her neck.

      “To the future” she whispered.